astoor (u/astoor) - Readit News

astoor commented on Satoshi – Sirius emails 2009-2011 mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/... · Posted by u/lawrenceyan

Given his past it's hard to imagine Le Roux sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bitcoins, even from inside a federal prison.

astoor · 2 years ago

Given his past it is easy to imagine his keys got misplaced while on the run or met with some kind of "unfortunate accident".

astoor commented on What do I think about Community Notes? vitalik.eth.limo/general/... · Posted by u/pra6in

astoor · 2 years ago

In reference to the article's question: "could we turn Community Notes itself into something that's more like an economist algorithm?" My answer would be: no, as soon as you add an economic incentive to a system such as this, you break it, by adding an immediate and direct incentive for abusing and gaming it. FWIW that's why I think the concept of "credible neutrality" applied to money is a fantasy, like a neutral weapon (as soon as it is used it has, by definition, to have taken a side).

astoor commented on Is the US trying to kill crypto? bbc.com/news/business-658... · Posted by u/activiation

astoor · 3 years ago

The article fails to point out that cryptocurrency has already effectively been banned (or at least delegitimised) in other major economies like China and India, so the US is in some sense just playing catch-up. At this stage, at the national level, cryptocurrency is primarily supported by mafia states like Russia, rogue states like North Korea, micro-states like various Caribbean islands, and otherwise failing states.

astoor commented on Binance commingled customer funds and company revenue, former insiders say reuters.com/investigates/... · Posted by u/momentmaker

nologic01 · 3 years ago

Its a pity that a decade and more of hyperactivity, speculation and noise in cryptofinance will not leave much to show for it but the smoldering ruins of bizarre house-of-cards.

We have financial systems that are certifiably broken, there are countless ideas about how to fix them, the digital era makes new ideas easy to explore and everybody would objectively be better off with some genuine innovation

yet all we've got is this manic obsession spawned by bitcoin that has no economic objective whatsoever.

If that is "efficient allocation of capital" one wonders what inefficiency looks like.

astoor · 3 years ago

The irony is that Bitcoin was created in direct response to the perceived shortcomings of the traditional financial system (see the message in the genesis block), but since then the traditional financial system has cleaned itself up enormously, while cryptocurrency has had the exact opposite trajectory and is now nothing more than a magnet for actual or latent fraudsters.

astoor commented on Humanness in the Age of AI worldcoin.org/blog/engine... · Posted by u/allanberger

astoor · 3 years ago

Note that this is the same Worldcoin that has been going round poor countries scanning people's eyeballs with an orb in exchange for some shady cryptocurrency with the primary objective of making some billionaires richer. See e.g. previous discussions on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28947468 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998065 . I thought trying to turn our world into a terrifying dystopia for private profit was scary, but this article trying to sell it as something that is somehow beneficial for humanity is even worse.

astoor commented on How crypto goes to zero economist.com/finance-and... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

BLKNSLVR · 3 years ago

The one interesting thing about all the rehashed boring arguments is that, despite being 13 years old, it's still so, so new that even smart, technically minded people like the HN readership will still bag it for not being whatever they heard it was attempting to be when it started.

Bitcoin is a new thing, sitting on the shoulders of the giant technologies we're otherwise so proud of - all us highly paid software industry folks.

But no, it's worthless, it shouldn't exist, it's not worth any further time or effort or research, fuck it off my fucking planet.

It's so weird this attitude so prevalent on HN.

astoor · 3 years ago

Thirteen years is a very long time in technology. The "problem" with HN is that many of us have been around since the start of cryptocurrency, and have a very deep rather than superficial understanding of the technology. That means we have seen how the cycles work out (start out with something reasonable, e.g. a system for "small casual transactions" in Bitcoin's case, fail to deliver, change promises, fail to deliver, and rinse and repeat, each time with a new generation of greater fools) and understand that each new wave of promises are impossible to deliver for various technical and in some cases non-technical reasons. Unfortunately the current generation of proponents just don't have the depth of experience to understand this, and are blinded by false hope that this is their generation's breakthrough technology, so are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their forebears. FWIW I don't think it'll go to zero or disappear - it satisfies a niche in some human's psyche to try to "get rich quick" with little effort - just like we've had Multi Level Marketing schemes like Mary Kay for decades, and casinos and various forms of gambling for centuries.

astoor commented on Proof of solvency and beyond vitalik.ca/general/2022/1... · Posted by u/dayve

hef19898 · 3 years ago

You are aware that casinos, and their "tokens", are pretty well regulated? Not the least becasue they are great way to launder money?

astoor · 3 years ago

Yes, casinos are pretty well regulated in most countries, which is why I wrote "At best they [cryptocurrency coins and tokens] are like casino tokens". Although casinos don't have a spotless record, e.g. US$63 million from the 2016 Bangladesh Bank cyber heist is suspected to have been laundered via casinos in Manilla.

astoor commented on Proof of solvency and beyond vitalik.ca/general/2022/1... · Posted by u/dayve

KaiserPro · 3 years ago

Premise: proving that you are solvent using cryptographic means

Answer: let's re-invent accounting.

Look the problem is this, as an "exchange", to be profitable you either need to charge fees, or do some sort of fractional reserve, using deposited value as capital for your Exchange's investments.

If you go for option one, then you will be undercut by someone doing option two. The tradeoff being, number two is more likely to loose all your customer's cash.

The value of something is more often than not irrational. This means that there is subjectivity in the value of assets. You can't technology your way out of that. This means that its perfectly possible to prove that you have liquid assets that will cover your present position. However thats expensive to maintain. So you start buying longer term more illiquid assets (think property, commodities, companies, etc) some of these are liquid in a day, others months.

Worse still the value of them depends on how and when you sell them.

So sure you can have assets that cover all your liabilities one day, then due to a re-valuation, not have enough.

Thats not the same as solvent though.

But, all of this neatly misses the point of crypto. If its a practical payment system, rather than an investment, you wouldn't hold your crypto at an exchange. You hold it your self and move it when you need to convert/liquidate.

astoor · 3 years ago

Looking for a cryptographic solution to this is certainly missing the point - it presupposes cryptocurrency coins and tokens are assets in the traditional sense, which they are not. At best they are like casino tokens - they have no intrinsic value, no legal entitlement to anything, and their use is entirely at the discretion of the issuing casino. That works fine for casinos because everything operates within the casino. The problem is that cryptocurrency wants to go outside the cryptocurrency sphere and into the real world, which is something that it is simply not designed to do. As we have seen, this leads to endless exploits, e.g. VCs and exchanges printing up billions of dollars worth of tokens, claiming they are actual assets (imagine a real casino printing chips with a total face value of $1.6 billion and claiming they had $1.6 billion in assets), convincing retail "investors" to exchange real money for those "assets", and then using that real money to gamble in different casinos.