Every few decades, libertarians need to be reminded why regulations exist. Time passes, and people forget why the SEC, FTC, FDA, FDIC, OSHA, child labor laws, et al were even created.
Cryptocurrencies created a completely anarchic monetary system, which people have used to layer investment systems on top of. Naturally, low hanging fruit scams and cons have arisen, and some form of governing structure will eventually be imposed, if not by actual governments, then by the community. Then more sophisticated abuses and negative externalities will arise, and ever more sophisticated regulations will be imposed by the community to thwart them.
In the end you may end up with something very much looking like a government, where people with connections and leverage in the governing structures get to decide the evolution of the rules, where a few players with disproportionate wealth or hashing power, help elect those people to committee positions. And once again, people will be looking to create systems to escape the defacto control and cronyism imposed on the system.
I guess what I'm saying is, nature abhors a vacuum, and given human nature, most systems will evolve to thwart the worse tendencies of the worst people, opening opportunities for others to capture power. So in the end, rather than seek to bring down our democratically elected government monetary systems via technology, we should seek to evolve them with ideas from technology.
Because booting out fiat currency and rebooting with crypto really just forces a painful relearning of all of the lessons we've learned in the last century of modern finance.
I'm a registered Libertarian (lol) who isn't against reigning in ICOs. My chief concern is regulation creep from problems that do exist, to problems that may exist in the future, but aren't really a current concern. I find targeting the latter gives a government a whole lot of elbow room to extract wealth, via things like trade license fees, ICO officiation fees, a requirement that a coin some some property that creates a weak binding with a given fiat currency, etc.
It is worth noting though, that ICOs are primarily a problem because there are a lot of hungry investors looking to 100x their returns, and don't have the tech background required to dissect a whitepaper. Protecting the gullible and uninformed from the manipulative is one of hardest tasks of any society, and the fight is never ending.
It's very much a thing over in Europe though, the new MiFID II directive is a thing intended to protect investors - one implementation that (online) investment banking sites have to offer now is things like a basic test, that is, you need to prove you have half a clue what you're doing.
Having a tech background does allow you to better understand what is going on and how it might provide value - conversely, a finance background is probably a good thing to have if you're looking at the IPO for a B2B financial services company
Same with Uber. IMO rebooting attracts people because regulation free allows for wild (easy, quick) gains, so lots of people will jump on the "opportunity" until the real cost reveal themselves at which point they will realize the losses. It's a bit physical, this crowd needed a way to unleash their energy and the official market was outside of their reach, providing another petri dish so to speak allowed for the reaction to occur, but it's unsustainable and transient. I think that America was the same in the 17th. Also the movie industry moved away from the East coast to the wild west to free themselves of regulations; only to create their own decades later.
I don't see how a decentralized cryptocurrency could possibly regulate itself efficiently. How would you go about banning even the most basic manipulations?
Take wash trading. How can you possibly ban wash trading? To do this you need to verify that identity of seller X != identity of seller Y. Even dismissing currencies that actively prohibit this verification (Monero), how do you possibly accomplish this in a decentralized currency?
Even without the identities issue, who is looking at bitcoin governance and thinking that deciding protocol changes with a decentralized electoral system is going to produce anything but gamesmanship and paralysis. Promising newcomer coins Abc will have the same issues once there's real money at stake.
And yes. Manipulation exist in the traditional monetary system. However, regulations raise the cost of manipulation to prohibitively high levels for most people. And yes, congress is dysfunctional. But underneath the chaos we have a set of fairly well established rules, and changing those rules didn't require forking the currency.
The problems with our economic system are political, not technological. What crypto brings to money is superfluous technology and even worse politics than we already have.
I don't think anyone disputes the fact that whales control markets. I don't think we can have it any other way... free markets will never be fair / equal for all unless you have a communist system in play.
What crypto does to finance is eliminate more middle men than ever before and bring more transparency than ever before. The majority of people would consider that a good thing.
It doesn't mean the poor get wealthier or the rich get poorer, it just means things are more transparent, which creates a more level playing field.
Billions of dollars can't just go 'missing' like it can in the traditional fiat system for a variety of reasons - mainly because we're relying on humans to (a) be honest and (b) remember to manually file paperwork.
Crypto brings its own set of problems but like any form of technology, it will evolve over time so long as there are advantages to using it. And so long as it evolves, there'll always be new opportunities along with new casualties.
So we have more transparency with these completely opaque ICO situations where the company name and country of operation isn't even clear? Versus the highly regulated filing requirements and GAAP independent audit requirements of a public company? Huh?
> Every few decades, libertarians need to be reminded why regulations exist.
No more than repeat offenders remind you of why Gulags exist. In your mind the hypothetical libertarian just doesn't want any regulation because he forgets that regulations have any good impact.
It's simply tone deaf.
> In the end you may end up with something very much looking like a government, where people with connections and leverage in the governing structures get to decide the evolution of the rules, where a few players with disproportionate wealth or hashing power, help elect those people to committee positions. And once again, people will be looking to create systems to escape the defacto control and cronyism imposed on the system.
There are 'good governments' and 'bad governments'. The rich and powerful try to game the system in both of them but there are much more effective in bad govts than in good govts.
So the question is, what separates a society which ends up with good governments (for example western societies) than societies which end up with bad governments (pretty much all the non-western societies).
This is precisely where the argument breaks down. According to libertarians, there is a reason X (whatever that might be) which separates good from bad governments. According to libertarians, that reason is 'economic freedom', the places where good govt exists, there is economic freedom, and places with bad government lacks economic freedom (even dictatorship like Singapore, UAE, or ex-dictatorships like S Korea are far better off than their non-economic free counterparts).
You may disagree what the cause 'X' is (according to alt-right that cause X is genetic-cultural environment, as places with good govt tend to be white westerners and places with bad govt tend to be non-white non-westerners).
But a plain denial of differences between good govts and bad govts is insane.
The difference with cryptocurrencies, and the part I find particularly exciting, is this time the structure is independent of nation states. Conceptually this is a big leap forward. I do agree with "meet the new boss, same as the old boss", that is likely the scenario. But even incremental improvements in objective rule of law have improved the human condition, and if cryptocurrencies can improve this in the financial realm that is a good thing.
Also not to imply that the whole space isn't rife with scams and foolish ideas at the moment, nor to imply nation states aren't going to plant a boot firmly on the head of the entire program as that well could happen. Because at the end of the day it sits on a platform that is ultimately controlled by nation states.
The notion that cryptocurrencies would displace fiat in our lifetimes was always a red herring.
This is the real impact they will have in the long run: the technology will greatly expand the set of people and organizations who can issue a currency. Fiat will have a lot of competition that it didn't have before. Competition is bad for incumbents, but good for the rest of us.
So the libertarian dream will probably still be realized, just in a more measured manner than some frenzied speculators and early adopters would have you believe (which shouldn't come as a surprise at all).
Competition isn’t an inevitable good. While it’s a very powerful tool in certain markets, in others it carries more risk than benefits. Currency is not really a realm that is lacking in competition anyway. The main competitive drive in the cryptocurrency world appears to be tax and banking law evasion, and now scamming naive investors. Harder to do those things with Euros and Rupees.
I think it is about timing. Myspace didn't work out but Facebook did. Apple couldn't push its product until later. The reason people keep going back to 0 is that the current system is not the most efficient one. The process will repeat until it hits the right time.
At that time it'll gain momentum and thwart the current system.
I'm not sure MySpace's chief sin was timing. Plenty of people used it. However, I seem to remember that people could easily modify the style of their profile page and so you had garish glittery bright-colored pages all over the place. Facebook came along then and gave users absolutely no control over the style of their page, keeping things clean and standardized.
FB's chief avenue to success was that they turned the chicken-and-egg problem of social networks (they are only helpful when lots of people your know are on the same network) into a shining example of the strength of the network effect. They did so by limiting signups to a single campus at first. Then they grew by expanding to specific campuses only. They made it so that facebook became the network for the students on each of those campuses to be on, yet kept the allure up by being exclusive. By the time they opened up to the wider public, the brand was super strong and entrenched.
Also, facebook had a huge amount of money to throw at marketing. That shouldn't be forgotten. They essentially bought success by spending that money, when lots of other social networks never were able to do so.
> Imagine you’re investing in Apple in 1980. There is plenty of risk involved and you’re still not sure this Jobs kid has what it takes, but do you like the idea? The mission? The product?
This is delusional. From Apple's Wikipedia:
"Between September 1977 and September 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533%"
They were selling products that people wanted for profit. Comparing ICOs to this is ludicrous and seems to me to encapsulate the hazy thinking of this entire sector.
We aren't there yet. Successful projects are building protocols with the goal of developers using them to build next-gen products that people actually want. Current speculation (a16z, polychain, ...) is that it will take another few years for this rollout to really take effect.
> This part of the process is usually considered one of the first steps in a successful business.
You're absolutely right, of course. However, I'm reminded of this wonderful (recent) quote by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi:
"Business is actually surprisingly good for everything that the company went through. The part of the business that is not going well is the profitability part. We have some details to work out."
People actually want to press a button on their phone and have a car show up and take them somewhere seamlessly. Uber has been doing that since they launched.
Doing it profitably and sustainably is another question. But the basis of the enterprise isn't even a little confusing.
My point: a business without actual products people want to use is not viable (contrary to what some appear to think), but a business without profitability is not viable, either.
(you're right, Uber has a slick product, though arguably because they subsidise it.)
I will repeat myself from another ICO thread last week: you cannot have investment vehicles where commiting fraud results in no punishment. It simply doesn't work. Until someone figures out a way to even somewhat integrate ICOs into the existing legal system, this will keep happening.
In case you’re wondering why your comment is all gray: people think you should go to your school and demand your money back if you think „pied piper“ was invented by the TV series.
(Unless you’re not in Europe or its cultural descendants)
I know that it is a children's story. What I meant in the comment was that the whole story about food on blockchain and the eventual ending about penis seems to reflect the SeeFood app arc in the TV series. That is why the image was used.
If people thought otherwise then I guess my commenting skills are not that great.
..."People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it feels authoritative and familiar."
animex comment is so true by the way that it is insanely ridiculous. Anything that is said about ICO can be directly applied to Synthetic CDOs that do not contain what is claimed. How many people went to jail for selling those fraudulent products?
By this logic we should be using tax payers money to compensate people who suffered losses in ICOs. And we should also use tax payers money to pay the bonuses of the ICO leading CEOs afterwards. How can this be: https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-a-blast-from-a-financial-cri...
The main difference here is that Wall Street does have more well regulated segments, such as your traditional investments like stocks and bonds. I think disclosure of the nature of investment is a key here. Even more risky areas (options and whatnot) can be approached at with at least some degree of analysis -- you are investing in companies of whom are required to maintain a series of statistics that can help you determine value.
Fraud still happens even in this space, but it's not a huge moonshot like an ICO would be in the best of circumstances (let alone the completely fraudulent make-money-fast type ICO scams.)
My thought on the CDO crisis and the somewhat nonchalant reaction from regulators, is that this was a sign that Wall Street needed more regulation in certain areas, their howls of protest on regulations that did appear post-2008 (eg Dodd-Frank) notwithstanding. It is worth noting that in the Savings and Loans scandal 20ish years earlier, people were jailed for selling fraudulent investment vehicles. The reaction to the CDO driven crisis in contrast was very weak IMHO.
all the same laws are applicable and fraud is fraud.
what is more interesting is that a variety of traditional control mechanisms appear to be ineffective at stopping the two voluntary parties from interacting whereas for banking and brokerages they are sufficient.
I'd hate to see a second useless set of laws be made, similar to "hate crimes" (a crime is a crime - except when you say a certain something or think a certain way?? wtf) but how would you even enforce a law requiring specific criteria for an ICO when an anonymous 14 year old kid anywhere in the world can do it in 20 minutes??!
i am of the thought that not every guerilla ICO has to be brought to justice but the "rule of law" requires some semblance of respect and obedience and I've been to countries where everything is up for negotiation and no law is "rule". slippery slope. perception of authority should not be diluted if possible.
seems the nation state's reach has started to exceed it's grasp....
I've never understood the problem some people have with hate crimes. Don't we already have plenty of crimes where the only differentiator is mental state or intent? Hard to see how a hate crime classification is any different than, say, Murder 1 versus Murder 2.
I would assume it's a perceived sense of lack of fairness in the sentencing; to be clear, I share your position on hate crimes. They exist for the same reason that we have both Murder and Manslaughter charges, because our system of law considers intent as part of the sentencing.
But it is not hard to see how some would view such laws as unfair. Intent can be difficult to prove and it requires interpretation; if you believe in clear cut and easily understandable laws, then naturally Hate Crimes and other such laws probably seem like a bad idea, and I get why that is frustrating and even intimidating with how fast gossip can travel. The system itself is built with release valves, but it's likely not much comfort for the wrongly accused.
I think that's a separate problem, however, which is just exacerbated by perceptions of laws like Hate Crimes as opposed to being caused by the laws themselves.
> all the same laws are applicable and fraud is fraud
No, it's not the same when you can use pseudonyms and provide fake data with the intent of deceiving someone.
> what is more interesting is that a variety of traditional control mechanisms appear to be ineffective at stopping the two voluntary parties from interacting whereas for banking and brokerages they are sufficient.
Fraud is not two voluntary parties interacting, it's one party stealing someone's money without their consent
> but how would you even enforce a law requiring specific criteria for an ICO when an anonymous 14 year old kid anywhere in the world can do it in 20 minutes??!
Admittedly I'm not sure, but my off the cuff thought is that you seize assets and prevent cashing out. Any wallet associated with a dubious ICO could be tracked and anyone that facilitates transactions for them could be targeted. If an exchange facilitates their cashing out they will have their assets seized; if a tumbling service receives assets from those wallets they will be subject to criminal action; if a bank facilitates a cash out they will be banned from participating in the US financial system etc.
Honestly at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. At this rate ICOs will either be outright banned or anyone with half a brain will stay far away from them and the hype will die out.
- the actual identity of the people behind them is not known; they are often pretending to be developers with Eastern Europe;
- they are presumably outside of a jurisdiction that their victims would be familiar with.
This probably means that a simple fix could be to demand to verify and publish the identity of the people behind such projects. Whether a shell corporation based in the US could raise money without clarifying who actually owns them and whether that structure allows enforcing fraud is a more nuanced question that I cannot answer. But I can answer this: new laws are probably not the solution. Extradition treaties might help but are unlikely.
Viewed solely from a US perspective, no new laws are needed; rather the SEC needs to enforce existing laws.
Internationally I suspect we need a better framework for handling cases where person in country A advertises securities in an organisation set up in country B to people in country C, via an organisation that operates in country D.
There's a thing that bothers me with ICO, it's when people call it an investment. It has nothing to do with an investment, it's basically a presale for the service that the company will provide.
It offers you nothing of what buying shares of the company will (except when explicitly specified in the token sale) : no dividend, no voting power...
Expecting to earn money by buying tokens in an ICO is pure speculation, as you expect the token to go up. But this goes against the real user's will to use the service: they want a fixed price (who wants to use a service which price changes every day?)
To sum up, buy tokens as you would buy presales in Kickstarter, to support the company, but don't expect to earn money with it if you really it to be a real service / product. And avoid ICO that make you the promise of earning quick money.
Agreed 100%. Buying tokens from an ICO is akin to funding a project on kickstarter - and we all know how often kickstarter projects fulfill their promise..
I totally agree with you. I am, however reminded of minecraft, and I wonder if there are any lessons to learn from there. Minecraft was an odd anomaly where Notch made it clear that he was going to keep increasing the game's price as it got more features (largely unheard of at the time, where game's prices tended to only go down). There was a point where I bought a license when it was $10, and I knew it was going to be a hit. It just was the right game at the right time that captured too much of the imagination of everyone who played it. But it never occurred to me to buy lots of licenses at $10 knowing they'd be worth more the next time he ratcheted up his game price. Course, reselling licenses has it's risks, and was painful enough I might not have bothered had it occurred to me.
I wonder if there'd been a marketplace for reselling license tokens and a blockchain to keep track of these tokens, if I might have taken the plunge and purchased a number of these tokens with the expectation to make money from them when license costs went up?
There is a big difference between a Kickstarter and an ICO, namely that ICOs allow you to resell the tokens in open marketplaces. If you decide you're not interested after all the next day you can resell the token.
1- Silly idea adjuncted with the blockchain label
2- No immediate answer to the question "How this is going to make money ?"
3- A white paper without substance, just a piece of marketing paper convincing you about the scheme with lots of use case diagrams etc
4- Ratio of advisors and other fuzzy titles / technical people at 10+
Serious question: are there any ICOs that aren't scams? Or are there any ICOs that have raised money for something and have actually delivered that something? Seems like everyone from children to grandmas are doing ICOs these days and I've yet to hear about anything that _wasn't_ a scam.
Separating bad actors and their crypto from good actors and their crypto is where were headed next. Lessons in due diligence apply to crypto just as with any other investment vehicle but it seems many have missed this. The crypto space is being refined, which is a good thing.
It's not so early. People have been developing apps on top of Bitcoin Blockchain for years now. Ethereum has been almost 2 and half years ago. I am not expecting any unicorns like Google/Facebook but at least couple of dapps with actual customers (e.g. not couple hundred crypto fanatics that sign up to every dapp just to pump the price) that are growing revenue and customer base and seem like a legitimate business.
I've been following crypto space for a long time but can't think of any blockchain app like that. Only money making companies are exchanges which make money from fees because of the mania and all the people trying to flip tokens to make big bucks and quickly sell to other noobs, but exchanges are old fashioned companies with centralised databases and Java/.NET codebase, they are not actual dapps.
I was there, it was great. Suddenly I could access tons of information, save hundreds of dollars by sending emails instead of long distance calling, look up airline schedules, download lists of jokes, find local singles looking to mingle, browse mail order catalogs, read recipes, or order books from a small Seattle company with a huge selection.
The personal real-world benefits of the www were real and obvious and constantly improving. What has the blockchain actually done for people on a daily basis?
The WWW was developed 1989, first software (browser) in 1990, first websites went live in 1991, Mosaic came out in 1993, and things really exploded from 1994 on, with Amazon, Spiegel Online (German weekly newspaper), Pizza Hut, The Economist, etc. all going online.
Dotcom bubble was 1997 to 2001.
Bitcoin white paper came out in 2008, first software release in 2009. With comparable development, we'd have expected an explosion of usage and applications from 2013 already (that didn't happen), and a bubble about 2016 to 2020 (that arguably did happen).
At any rate, the WWW was super useful (and was being extensively used) pre- and during the bubble. You cannot say the same about cryptocurrencies.
(And by the way, during the dotcom bubble there were several companies, such as Flooz and Beenz, offering digital currencies. They're all defunct now. If only they had been decentralised on the blockchain...)
Name one use case for cryptocurrencies where they work better than existing technologies and that does not involve buying illegal stuff online.
Seriously, I must be writing a comment like this one at least two times a week lately on HN. I keep hearing "blockchain technology is here to stay, think of the possibilities!" and I say that it's already showing its limitations and people are scrambling to find real world use cases for them. See the Diamond Coin story the other day, or that Kodak Coin thing. When you look closely you realize that the technical side of things doesn't really hold up or could be achieved using good old non-buzzword technologies.
Cryptocurrencies are amazing if you want to create a ponzi scheme or buy drugs online. For everything else there's Mastercard.
Honestly the best use case is actually for the very financial services industry that the crypto community thinks they are supplanting. Distributed ledger with trusted confirmations + quicker and cheaper wires is actually pretty big. It's a rock solid use case that a couple of big banks have openly said they are working on. Of course, it's almost certain that any currency they move will probably end up pegged to a fiat, so that idea doesn't give people the warm and fuzzies, to say the least.
Note that these applications are strictly about actual currency. This is not a counterpoint, I'm just pointing it out because I hear many people saying that the blockchain has many uses outside of just cryptocurrencies but I have yet to hear a compelling case.
>private transactions: your identity need not be associated with donating to wikileaks or buying a sex toy
We have to define "private", currently my purchase history is not exactly public even though some trusted entities do have access to it.
In the same way I keep getting conflicting viewpoints about transactions on the blockchain. Are they public or not? I ask because every time I point out that cryptocurrencies are a dream come true for anybody who's trying to evade taxes, launder money or corrupt politicians I always have somebody telling me that it's not true because with enough effort you can track money on the public blockchain. So which one is it?
>irreversible: no chargebacks or transaction reversals
As a consumer this is an obvious negative. As a seller it might also be because people will be more afraid to send money to somebody without reputation. So good for Amazon but bad for the little guy selling home made socks on ebay.
>unseizable: protection against civil forfeiture, IRS account seizures for "structuring", etc
Ah yeah, the "my government has issues so the obvious solution is to get rid of it" line of thought. Maybe you should work on fixing these weird idiosyncrasies instead of trying to find a way around them, because maybe you're being honest but I can assure you that there's a long line of thugs behind you waiting to use your "protection" scheme to evade taxes and regulations. You can't have a working government if you make taxes "opt-out".
>remittance: send any amount of funds anywhere in the world with minimum fees with no 3rd party ever having access to funds
That's only valid if you don't need any guarantees whatsoever (like a pure donation without counterparts or sending money to somebody you trust). If you try to buy something from an untrusted source you'll want a 3rd party to provide arbitration. No chargeback, remember?
As for the "minimum fees" we'll see about that when some cryptocurrency is actually used "at scale" to do this.
>exit from corrupt monetary policies: see Argentina, Venezuela
I can't offer any rebuttal to this but I wonder how much good it'd do. Rich people would be able to exfiltrate their money more easily to other countries and poor people will convert their 0peso into 0BTC. I'd be really curious to read a serious study about how things would've changed in Venezuela if they had switched to BTC before the crisis. I don't really believe in magic bullets, the failings of the Venezuelan economy are multiple and go way beyond a choice of currency.
I can't shake the feeling that if you put money out of the hands of the government you effectively give all the economy power to the rich people and it's effectively harming democracy. You seem to have a very USA-centric point of view (judging by your examples above) so I ask you: when you look at the state of the USA and its government, do you really think "damn, I really wish rich people had more power"?
Yes, lets. From Crank it up article[1]: "In 1995, from Q1 to Q4, Netscape's revenue went from $5 million to $10 million to $20 million to $40 million."
Netscape was formed in April of 1994 so we are talking about 9 months after creation they had revenue of 5mil. First website was launched at the end of December 1990 so less than 4.5 years before. Blockchain is significantly older at this point.
And significantly more complex than a 1990's website having a a drastically different and unrefined business model connected to an actual trading vehicle. Try running a startup and let us know how long it takes for the average startup to start bringing in consequential revenue.
It's clear there's lots of unfounded disdain for crypto among certain software engineering camps as crypto is a combination of software engineering and financial engineering which is downright repulsive to certain purists.
If you step outside of this line of thinking and understand the power of a trading vehicle and it's ability to finance operations or fund research, that might shed some new light on things.
First, please do not pretend that you know me. I have neither a problem with financial engineering in principle (combined with software engineering or not) or cryptography as such and certainly would not describe myself as any sort of purist.
Not sure what running startups have to do with it (although have plenty of experience with them too), but comparing average startup with any ICO one is disingenuous. As far as I can tell there is little to show for so far if one ignores companies not aimed at cryptocurrencies ecosystem itself.
But more to the point, it has been 9 years since Bitcoin was released building on ideas that were even older. Tech is more complicated than building website mid-90s (although probably not as much as you seem to believe), but again is not that complicated to excuse lack of compelling products.
I am not saying those will not come, but "early days" is a piss-poor excuse.
I do, however, dislike your use of crypto as for an old fart like me this should be used for cryptography.
The author was more saying that this was going to be new way to fund startups, with coins that get speculatively gambled. So rather than crypto-coins being used as per the original dream of wonderful decentralised money with no payment fees and 'better than gold' store of wealth, in fact these coins are going to be the new way for companies to raise capital for taking their startup to the next level - so crypto-alt-coins are going to be replacing 'Kickstarter', 'YC' as well as the big VC companies as cited in the article.
So then the merit of a coin will be 'backed' by business fundamentals, i.e. is the business any good? So think of crypto-coins as shares, not this magic bean currency and everyone is a winner.
The one question which any of these Crypto ICOs dont answer is why do I want to get paid/pay in their coin over actual cash! There is only drawbacks with it!
It won’t be. Every ICO I’ve bought into and the subsequently sold once it hit the exchanges has made me ridiculously amounts of money. Some sells were stupid, others were brilliant but they were all green.
My stocks have increased as well and hold the majority of my investments, but they increased by 11% last year. My Cryptocurrency increased by 1153% in the same period of time. As long as that happens Cryptocurrency isn’t going away, even if it makes no sense.
It’s taking money from other people by selling useless shit, so it’s obviously not going to last forever.
And "taking money from other people by selling useless shit [that plays on their naïve hope to also get rich quick]" doesn't trouble your conscience at all, I assume?
It seems like I will continue collecting downvotes on this topic but I will give yet another try.
I would not be totally against regulation and government intervention into blockchain space (and any other space as well). In fact, it would be really good for the space have reasonable but friendly regulation which would clean up space from outright scams.
Unfortunately, governments usually don't try to came up with reasonable regulation but rather killing regulation. One notable example is BitLicense which lead to mass exodus of cryptocurrency-related companies from New York.
Real life example of sad result of such regulation:
> If you live in a restricted area — any country on the U.S. sanctions list, as well as the states of Alabama, Connecticut, Hawaii, New York, Vermont and Washington — regulations prevent us from sending you lumens. Unfortunately, therefore, residents of restricted areas are not eligible for an award.
This sentence is exact reason why I really hate regulators and people who are very enthusiastic about big government cracking down cryptocurrency space just because of few really stupid and obvious pump and dump scams on coins I've never heard of.
Fortunately, I don't live in New York and US. I'm rather give here examples familiar to Hacker News readers.
Another thing I hate about regulators is notion of accredited investor. Which says:
> In the United States, to be considered an accredited investor, one must have a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary residence
Which basically says - rich gets richer and you poor little guy is too stupid for participating in potentially highly lucrative deals.
I know what you will say - the governments try to protect ordinary people from scams. Don't you think it's a little overshoot??? Instead of keeping so high barrier of entry, the government could impose some sort of exams if you want to accredited investor. Or as alternative, make sure a person won't put more than 10% of early net income in high risk projects. That's what I would call friendly regulation.
So I see how government try to regulate (just practically ban things) and I tell - it's better having no regulation at all!
Some of the information you present is incorrect. One example: An accredited investor doesn't need $1MM net worth in the US. The requirement can be satisfied by just $200K personal income. This is stated in the very first sentence of the wiki entry that you linked.
> Which basically says - rich gets richer and you poor little guy is too stupid for participating in potentially highly lucrative deals.
It's more along the lines of having enough money to weather the value of your investments disappearing.
How does a slow, expensive, global time-stamping service which cannot scale to billions or even tens of millions of users create a foundation for a sound business model to track all the food?
Well in this specific case the fundamental problem is rather the fact that you need to store the quite large amount of data which is quite expensive. Adding blockchain on top just makes it even more expensive but doesn't offer any advantage.
"They created a credible white paper that, at the very least, tickled some of the neophilic nerves, and they had an active, if scammy, social media presence. That is literally all you need to run an ICO these days and they did exactly as expected.
Then the whole thing imploded. On the 28th the scam shut down, leaving a website containing a single word: penis."
Crypto used to exclusively mean cryptography. Cell used to exclusively mean unit of living matter. Language evolves, and it's the popular culture that decides meanings. Cryptography isn't as popular as cryptocurrency. I don't know what you expect to gain by holding on to a definition losing the language war.
This sentiment comes up in almost every crypto thread and I think it's a bit misguided. It's referred to as crypto because...that's how people know it.
Google trends explains my point better than I ever could.
It also shows that this conflation is very, very recent. I assume this is either because some people realized that there is "more than bitcoin" now, so you can't keep saying "bitcoin" and mean all the cryptocurrencies, and they just thought "jeez, cryptocurrency is such a complicated word. Let's just use crypto!"
In any case, crypto has been established as short for cryptography for far longer than any of these currencies existed. It is used in this way as a distinguisher in many contexts (e.g. crypto-phones, crypto-locker, crypto protocols, ....); calling "crypto-X" just "crypto" is unnecessarily ambiguous.
(either...or it's some guys pushing their agenda very hard in the last few weeks)
What makes you say that? Neither is it inevitable, nor do people not care, as is evident by that literally every time an article using this term the wrong way is posted, people will post clarifications what the article is actually about and express their annoyance regarding the issue.
Clearly, people do actually care about others trying to coopt well-established language for their often fishy schemes.
Yes, a small number of people do care about this -- how many comments are these compared to the ones that are discussing the topic itself?
All I'm saying is: If you're going to try to tell people to not change the language as people seem to want to change it, because you don't want the language to change, then prepare for complaining for a long time with no results.
The point is even more dramatically illustrated if you zoom out further and show 2004-present, assuming your point is that "crypto" as a contraction of "cryptocurrency" is extremely recent; the usage is less than a year old, and therefore likely to confuse those of us who have been using "crypto" as shorthand while discussing "cryptography" for multiple decades.
(Perhaps linguistic coherence is more than we should expect from the cryptocurrency community, given that they have already inflicted upon themselves the utterly bizarre usage of "blockchain" as a mass noun.)
like when cyber started to become slang for sex while online.
it has probably happened through out history where well established names get hijacked when something else get picked up by the general population.
e.g.
Anecdotally, I once had someone on facebook randomly start berating me over the use of the word "trans", because I was being disrespectful. I was of course talking about transmissions/gearboxes, but this fact was lost on that person.
also: broadband. It originally contrasted with narrowband, and they describe modes for propagation of light through fiberglass cables... I thought it was really weird when I heard people on mainstream radio discussing such things. Eventually I realized they were using broadband as a synonym for 'fast internet' :P
I agree with your wider point, but the antonym of broadband in networking context is actually baseband.
'Narrowband' is a good example of a word that came into use to fill a perceived gap in the lexicon. A gap which didn't really exist, but the word became more widely used because it was not challenged by people who should know better.
Another example is 'bandwidth' which has so many colloquial meanings now that it is unusable in any general context. It's just a collection of letters that can mean anything you want. Also 'hacker'.
This is not the evolution of languge, it is its destruction. Overloading words with so many contrary or ambiguous meanings that language fails at its primary purpose of conveying meaning and intent.
I'm sure there's a name for this phenomenon. We shouldn't be calling remotely piloted quadcopters drones either, but "drone" has become a modern colloquialism for any UAV that isn't a remote controlled hobby plane.
I imagine this is one of the ways in which language evolves, for better or for worse.
Cryptocurrencies created a completely anarchic monetary system, which people have used to layer investment systems on top of. Naturally, low hanging fruit scams and cons have arisen, and some form of governing structure will eventually be imposed, if not by actual governments, then by the community. Then more sophisticated abuses and negative externalities will arise, and ever more sophisticated regulations will be imposed by the community to thwart them.
In the end you may end up with something very much looking like a government, where people with connections and leverage in the governing structures get to decide the evolution of the rules, where a few players with disproportionate wealth or hashing power, help elect those people to committee positions. And once again, people will be looking to create systems to escape the defacto control and cronyism imposed on the system.
I guess what I'm saying is, nature abhors a vacuum, and given human nature, most systems will evolve to thwart the worse tendencies of the worst people, opening opportunities for others to capture power. So in the end, rather than seek to bring down our democratically elected government monetary systems via technology, we should seek to evolve them with ideas from technology.
Because booting out fiat currency and rebooting with crypto really just forces a painful relearning of all of the lessons we've learned in the last century of modern finance.