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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31481 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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The progress being made here is remarkable and could soon make exchanges like FTX largely obsolete.

All a DEX does is convert one Ethereum token to another token, sorta like like a WOW marketplace. It's not at all like a replacement for the existing financial system. A DEX does not solve the problem of converting fiat to crypto or crypto back to usable fiat.

To make a difference in the wider world where our freedoms and independence are being aggressively stripped from us day by day, more real economic activity needs to take place on decentralized, open networks.

This may be true, but crypto is not the answer

I'm still waiting for substack to open BTC lightning payments.

It has been 5 years and lightning network has close to no adoption. Substack or any website accepting bitcoin does not solve the problem of converting fiat to bitcoin, which is cumbersome. The vast majority of people would rather just pay with fiat.

If you care about censorship and individual liberty, you'd be wise to get up to speed on crypto self-custody and see what you can do to use it more as "money" in your daily life.

Sticking your money in something that will likely to go zero or close to it is not a good way to protect one's liberty and freedom.

One 'rule' is that a product that is successful tends to be successful quickly. It's not something that is forced. Cellphones, social networks, the WWW, PayPal, iPhone, Walmart, Amazon, credit cards, TV, AOL, eBay, Google, Uber, mp3 players, etc all saw rapid adoption. Bitcoin after 12 years has not. So it may be a niche, but not something that will rise above that. That's not a total failure. But worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Likely not. One can argue that Bitcoin is a protocol like TLS and TCP and the the adoption will lay on it, but even then I am skeptical because it do not see what problem this solves.

The point is that more real economic activity needs done with crypto for it to truly make a difference. It's incredible it's gotten as far as it has without interacting with the real world much, but that is changing. the future will depend on people's willingness to use it and if they keep getting scared away or dismissing it, it will be a slow process. But it's looking inevitable barring some major catastrophe.

Lightning network may be a dead end (although it is still growing), as it is crippled by the ignorance and stubbornness of the bitcoin maxi's, but there are hundreds of other payment solutions being built on other crypto platforms. It's a race at this point and either the bitcoiners will compete or they won't.

Not to mention there are actual use cases of crypto today in countries with unstable financial systems.

Most of the companies and technologies you mention are exploring applications for crypto in their organizations. You may not see what problems it can solve, but millions of other people do.

FYI: DEXes exist on many networks, not just ETH, and cross-chain DEXes are becoming a thing.

One can argue that Bitcoin is a protocol like TLS and TCP and the the adoption will lay on it, but even then I am skeptical because it do not see what problem this solves

Well since you think that platforms with censorship officially built into them and regulated by telephone rule, like PayPal, are better because you can just pay for non-censored things instead, there's no hope of showing you the problem Bitcoin solves.

There still exists the possibility of censorship aided by chain analysis. Exchanges and merchants can reject tainted bitcoin, similar to how credit card companies can decline orders or refuse to do business with certain merchants. Crypto fiills a niche, but I don't see crypto ever gaining mainstream adoption or disrupting the global financial system. I myself have used crypto for small orders and would prefer it over PayPal , but few merchants want to accept bitcoin, in part because because so few people want to use it and it comes with the issue of having to convert the btc back into usable fiat.

Censorship is bad, I think everyone understands that. What's not so clear is if it is a problem that bitcoin can solve. It doesn't matter if you accept payment in BTC if your hosting service doesn't, if your payment processor doesn't, if any of the points of failure on the modern web refuse to take your payments. Could Bitcoin have saved Kiwi Farms?

At some point crypto has to onramp onto the fiat economy, and whatever benefits its proponents says it has collapses.

Yes, you basically need a full stack of society to make an alternative economy viable, and so long as incumbent players can entrap you and handcuff you at exchange point, this is not a problem crypto can solve. No, this is not a cogent argument to make against crypto as compared to inherently backdoored transaction platforms, which he does. The stack must be made of trustworthy blocks.

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