this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
29 points (68.4% liked)
Technology
61394 readers
3978 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It eludes you because you're a reasonable person who understands it's not necessary lol. Cryptobros and the blockchain are the very definition of "a solution in search of a problem" - a lot of great work has been put into this technology that sounds cool on the surface and that seems like it might be able to uniquely solve some problem, but they've yet to actually come up with anything of value (unless you see broad value in more efficiently scamming people or laundering money).
And yet it has failed to provide any real value in that front in over a decade of existence. Bitcoin itself and similar L1 blockchains are too horrifically inefficient and (aside from debatably Monero?) they haven't truly been any more private than traditional payment methods. L2 blockchains don't even help solve the problem of transaction speed/efficiency enough for widespread adoption, and other techniques such as sharding have problems of their own that harm viability as a valuable payment system. And none of this even touches on the instability in value of the currencies themselves - even "stablecoins" aren't safe, as we've seen from the collapse of several in recent years. The blockchain does not provide any broad value that is not already provided in better ways by other solutions that already exists - hence, "a solution in search of a problem".
It has increased in price due to artificial scarcity and speculation, not on its merits as a payment system or technology. Even most dedicated crypto traders these days don't even try to pretend that the price is tied to it's underlying value as a system, they are well aware that the price is largely tied to being traded as a speculative asset. Price does not inherently correlate to underlying value, especially since I was never talking about monetary value to begin with and you bringing this up distracts from my point that it provides no additional broad systemic value as a platform.
Lol the best response you can come up with is really to just hide behind "muh free markets" and to put words in my mouth?
But I'm feeling bored this morning so I'll digress and entertain your argument by tearing down your strawman: this has nothing to do with the efficiency of the free market or whether I think I'm smarter than it. As I already said, monetary value does not inherently correlate to the underlying value of something. This is furthered by the fact that the crypto market is incapable of abiding by the efficient market hypothesis because it has been co-opted as a platform for speculative trading by individuals and organizations moving massive amounts of money through the platform. The underlying "currencies" (though they're more realistically assets than currencies) don't create value like a company that you can trade shares in would, they do not provide real products and services that don't rely on continuously bringing in new investors like a business could, and they do not provide any novel solution over existing markets, currencies, assets, and payment systems that could lend themselves to a growing inherent value. It is well understood by not only outside observers of the crypto market but also by it's largest participants that an overwhelming percentage of crypto prices are tied solely to the number of investors in the market and the amount of money they put into it and that there is almost no true base value to them like there are real assets. This is why crypto prices fluctuate so wildly and why "stable"coins are capable of entirely collapsing. I guess you could argue that the stock markets are similarly propped up by large players, but publicly listed companies don't collapse as regularly as crypto assets do and the stock market as a whole does not see the same wild levels of fluctuation because investors are generally incentived to keep their assets in the market, even through downturns or economic scares, due to the inherent underlying increasing value of their assets.
And since you seem so intent on upholding the "free market" as some hyperintelligent being that isn't tied to the average intelligence of the humans participating in it, I'll bite the bait on that front for a minute as well: do I think I'm smarter than the "free market"? When it comes to crypto specifically, maybe I am, but much more importantly, I see myself as more rational than the crypto market and thus I don't participate in it. Since I understand there is not any inherent underlying value, I am significantly more comfortable being in classic asset classes with real value since I do not see crypto as being able to sustain high prices for long enough for me to cash out. I know I'm not smart enough to time any market, especially not a heavily volatile one, so I see it as the more rational decision to sacrifice what appears to be good short term gains currently in exchange for more stability and a significantly higher chance of maintaining higher gains in the long run. Sure, in 25-30 years when I'm ready to retire there could be a chance I'm wrong, but given that I've done enough research on crypto/blockchain to feel it lacks key properties to maintain value for that long, I don't feel like gambling on that chance like speculative crypto investors currently do.
(If you'd like I could probably write you a whole damn book on the various other reasons why I foresee crypto being unable to sustain long-term price gains, such as imminent government regulations or that wealthy participants are continuing to exit the market in the wake of collapses such as FTX's, but you don't seem to be willing to listen to anything other than the Voice of the Free Hand in your head, so I don't really want to waste my breath on that)