I guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it's only a problem for some people. If you're connected to the money printers, then it's useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, 'honest accounting' would not be a solution for you; 'honest accounting' would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for Enron.

Proof of Work is highly inefficient and inconvenient. I agree to this.

Cryptocurrency sector is mostly a scam; or at the very least, a kind of casino. I Agree to this; though my understanding is that it has been corrupted by mainstream financial interests; just like Africa is kept corrupt and poor by some of those same interests. Then the plebs basically blame African people for 'choosing this'.

I've worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt. I saw the change happening. The desire to improve things turned into self-sabotage. It was unlike any other company I ever worked for; nothing made sense. Yet I know for a fact that government regulators gave their approval. I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. It was all announced publicly though it took some time to understand that the projects were scams from the beginning... But like they got money from a government entity and they didn't build anything AT ALL. Then they got more funding on their next project... Weird right?

Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it's basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability.

Unless you fully understand the current mechanism of how money is created globally; including the Eurodollar system and how stablecoins, derivatives and other financial constructs could be used for legal counterfeiting, you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.

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Ekaros 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I never got the whole larger "crypto" economy. The number of meaningless alt coins. That come and go most of the time, build on zero any type but speculative value. Worse than any fiat.

And then stable coins. Fancy IOUs of fiat. Which might or might not have actual assets backing them. Which you might or might not be able to redeem. Say if Russian government had a billion in whatever stable coin. Could they redeem them and get real dollars transferred to some account they own?

	▲	globular-toast 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What is there to get? Do you get sports betting or lotteries? People play games. They invent arbitrary rules with real consequences and try to "win". Back in school we used to do things like "dare" people to do something or bet on a coin toss or something with the stakes being a snack or a desirable bit of stationery. I feel like everyone believes there is some clear boundary where things suddenly become "grown up" and "real". Do you remember when you became "grown up"? No? Nobody does. The secret is it never happens. The only difference is children have no "real" assets to play with. What makes some derivative traded on Wall Street, like a "synthetic CDO", any more or less meaningful than alt coins?
	▲	jongjong 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think the second line is touching on something. The implication is that there may be a kind of legal cross-nation counterfeiting happening. Stablecoins likely play a part. When I worked in crypto back in 2017, all the successful people would tell me that they thought there was something really wrong with Tether and they all believed it was propping up Bitcoin. They expected it to collapse any day... But here we are 8 years later. Ideally, countries should only be allowed to issue their own currency. It's not hard to see why a country being able to print another country's currency would pose a problem... With all money being digital and stored on thousands of distinct bank ledgers which basically don't have consensus, it would be very difficult to track with manual audits and with the current incentives in place. It would be trivial to hide these transactions under legitimate names as various forms of international payments.

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KaiserPro 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.

But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions)

Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can't treat it like "money" ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.)

There is no utility in stablecoins. They are basically joint stock company, but without an income, or case law to help you when it goes pop. Of course they are popular because they have no regulation and can basically do what banks do, but without any of the oversight need for stability/fraud prevention. "we are going to act like an investment bank, and create money, oh no, not by securities, but by word of mouth, that word being pyramid."

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KellyCriterion 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>> I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. <<

could you share some links here to these EU-supported projects?