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0 pointsvkou5y ago0 comments

> For a community of hackers, there really seems to be a lack of vision when it comes to crypto specifically.

The lack of vision panned out. Bitcoin is not a good currency, it is not bringing us into a decentralized land of milk and honey, it is environmentally ruinous, and all that it has accomplished is creating yet another financial gambling market. Broadly speaking, we already have enough of those. And I guess you can still use it to buy drugs. (Although, with $10 transaction fees, probably not. The drug folks would kindly prefer it if this whole bitcoin mania could blow over, and people could go back to gambling in Vegas, or on out-of-the-money GME calls, or whatever, so they could do their business in peace.)

Of the bright predictions of the future made in 2012 about it, the only relevant one that came to fruition by 2021 is 'Many people speculating on bitcoin made a lot of money.'

Of the dour predictions of the future made in 2012 about it, only the ones I listed came true.

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frongpik5y ago

Bitcoin, imho, is a clever way to redirect excess energy production into a trustless payments system. The fact that individuals have used personal gpus is an abveration. It will be governments running btc network on excess energy from nuclear plants, they will sign treaties to use only so much energy on btc to prevent the race to the bottom (similar to icbm treaties) and they will use btc for massive gov-to-gov transactions. Individuals in most countries will be barred from touching btc.

rudderz5y ago

I predict eventually a chain that doesn't require PoW will gain popularity.

Also, the chain won't have to be a store of value. Instead the value will be real assets represented as "tokens".

The asset can be anything. Stock, royalty rights, water rights, futures, commodities, etc.

The ledger would then act as an exchange/settlement layer that can match trades. Merchant denominates prices in shares of GOOG, customer pays with AAPL.

It seems like currency is largely helpful for providing liquidity for trades. It's hard to trade goats for camels if the other person doesn't want goats. The ledger I believe can help get around that.

ryebit5y ago

That's pretty much describing Ethereum (once it finishes switching to PoS in the next year or so). Popularity wise it's already doing way more than others in txn or $ volume.

It's NFT market for asset ownership (mainly artwork right now) is huge, there was literally a Christie's auction for an NFT token (and the art it represents) this week.

There aren't official stocks/commodities yet (I think) but a bunch of sythetic derivatives already. A couple of banks have even done test runs of bond issuance.

ETH itself is does have "store of value" qualities in background, but a trick was developed of using it as collateral to back on-chain stablecoins like DAI. That allows on-chain token markets/contracts to rely on USD-valuations for liquidity and baseline reference, independent of general "crypto" speculative fluctuations.

There's also Earnst & Young's "Nightfall" project that trying to bring b2b accounting on-chain using Eth's zero knowledge tools to retain privacy.

vkouOP5y ago

> Bitcoin, imho, is a clever way to redirect excess energy production into a trustless payments system.

It's utterly failed at that, because nobody actually cares about it as a payments system. People care about it as a speculative investment.

The more people care about it as a speculative investment, the worse it gets at being a payments system. We're seeing this today, as the costs of using bitcoin skyrocket, and the overwhelming majority of bitcoin transactions are sending it to and from fiat-to-bitcoin exchanges.

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