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The Rise of Whatever

(eev.ee)
627 points cratermoon | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 04:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.631s | source
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moritzwarhier ◴[04 Jul 25 07:31 UTC] No.44462055[source]▶
Cool post, but:

> And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ

PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early.

Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actually work for their salary into Bitcoin is a fraud.

I don't think the blog author actually wants this, but vaguely calling for Bitcoin to become "real money" indirectly will contribute to this bailout.

And yes, I'm well aware that funneling pension funds money etc into this pyramid scheme is already underway. Any politician or bank who supports this should be sued if you ask me.

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rcxdude ◴[04 Jul 25 09:58 UTC] No.44463051[source]▶
Yeah, I think for crypto to actually turn into something net-positive, Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value. It would almost certainly be some other network that would actually solve this problem, given Bitcoin's essentially frozen in a half-completed state now (Ethereum still seems to be trying to make something that scales to a point that would be usable, but it is also the nexus of a lot of the scams for the same reason)
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fsflover ◴[04 Jul 25 12:56 UTC] No.44464112[source]▶
> Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value

Why is that? You can just buy 0.00000001 BTC.

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1. immibis ◴[04 Jul 25 14:56 UTC] No.44465107[source]▶
Having currency is only meaningful if the amount of currency someone has correlates, at least loosely, to some kind of merit or work.

Let's say me and my friends agree to carve off 0.00002 BTC supply and pretend that is the whole world of currency. We could run a whole country using that 0.00002 BTC as money. Except that anyone who has 1 BTC can break into our walled garden and, with a tiny fraction of their holdings, buy the entire walled garden, and there's no way to prevent this as long as our money is fungible with theirs. It's the same reason you wouldn't use immibiscoins as a currency: I could just grant myself a zillion of them and buy everything you have. Except that in the case of bitcoin the grant is pre-existing.

Deflationary currencies are fundamentally unstable, just like currencies that one guy can print at will, because they decorrelate quantity and merit.

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2. tromp ◴[04 Jul 25 17:55 UTC] No.44466553[source]▶
It's such a shame that the premier cryptocurrency chose a speculation friendly emission that concentrated wealth on early adopters (its creator included) rather than a speculation resistant pure linear emission (no halvings) that would give future generations their fair share to mine.
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3. immibis ◴[04 Jul 25 18:43 UTC] No.44466902[source]▶
It's by design. Either the inventor knew what he was doing, or was tricked by someone who knew what they were doing. Perhaps it was invented by someone who made a lot of money speculating on gold so they knew how the model worked.

Luckily there's more than one cryptocurrency. Many of the current generation have asymptotically constant tail emissions, which doesn't really solve the underlying mismatch between emission and demand, but at least doesn't make it deliberately bad.

Well, there was one that tried to maintain a constant US$ price by cross-leveraging all of the risk onto a sister currency, but that crashed pretty hard (partly by the algorithm not working as well as thought, and partly by deliberate rugpull).

One that I'm aware of is radically different and allows both positive and negative balances that decay towards zero; although I don't really like that one's implementation, that feels like an idea worth exploring. It's pretty much incompatible with any traditional currency though.

Last time I named specific cryptocurrencies I got downvotes for advertising so I won't.