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Comment Re:The fact that it was mostly paper losses... (Score 1) 112

Is it much different than a stock that can see similar swings in valuation despite no real underlying changes?

Oh, very much so. If the S&P500 lost a trillion and change over a couple hours you'd see chaos. We're talking Great Recession levels here.

LOL. Let's not be overdramatic here. The total market cap of the S&P500 was $40T at the end of 2021. A $1T loss on that is a drop of about 2.5%. Would a drop of 2.5% cause chaos? No, it would be a big down day and might cause some concern, but Great Depression levels? *eyeroll*

Comment Re:Texas (Score -1, Troll) 284

I'm guessing he's ignoring the environmental costs, the transaction fees and the fact that it doesn't work as a currency because it can only do about 5 transactions per second in the entire world.

Any implementation would use an L2 solution like Lightning network, which scales up to 100k tps. But you do you and just keep spreading your FUD.

Comment Re:Stocks are NOT the same. (Score 1) 168

Except growth companies eventually mature and start paying dividends or they sell off entirely.

What makes you think cryptos won't do the same after they get out of their growth phase?

I'll agree that main crypto offers similar voting mechanisms in the way of miners.

Some tokens are specifically for voting, other tokens carry voting rights that allow the holders to determine whether a proposed change to the protocol takes place. This has nothing to do with miners.

Real currencies ultimately get their price from the value of the economy where they're used... Consider any country where the currency dropped 50% in value over a few months... Crypto as a currency is only used as an intermediary between fiat currencies and as speculation, but not as a long term wealth store... They've made virtually zero headway into being used as everyday currencies.

I've bolded the parts of your reply that I disagree with. The cryptoasset space is not about replacing currencies anymore. That may have been the original vision 14 years ago, but that's no longer the case. At this point, many cryptoassets represent usage / governance / rights-to-earnings from open, permissionless, distributed protocols. They are probably better compared to venture-stage companies (which explains their volatility), though that's not a completely accurate comparison. They represent a potential new asset class that blends characteristics of stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, and commodities.

Comment Re:Stocks are NOT the same. (Score 0) 168

I wish I had mod points to mod you (-1, uninformed luddite fudster), but in lieu of that...

Stocks pay dividends, crypto does not.

Many stocks -- notably growth stocks -- don't pay dividends. Crypto is an emerging asset class, so it's reasonable that most don't pay dividends. That said, there are a number of cryptoassets that provide some form of passive income.

Stocks include voting rights over top-level company decisions, crypto does not.

Cryptoassets are such a broad asset class that it's dangerous to generalize. Some cryptos don't offer voting rights, others do.

Stocks grant ownership of company property, delivered to you if the company flops, crypto does not.

In a bankruptcy, creditors might get something but usually shareholders get wiped out and get nothing. If you own shares in a bankrupt company, try showing up at company headquarters waving your stock certificate and demanding your share of the office furniture.

Stock value is partially tied to how successful the business is, crypto value is only tied to speculation.

Wrong again. Some cryptoassets (notably DeFi tokens) provide the ability for holders to collect proceeds from ongoing operations. And of course, for many cryptoassets, the coin/token is the right to use the network. As demand increases, the price will go up since supply is generally less elastic.

And all of these differences derive from the primary difference:

Stocks are stakes of ownership over a real, functioning, business that provides a real good or service. Crypto is ownership of nothing.

The main problem is that you have no idea what you're talking about. What you said may have been true 8-10 years ago, but the space has evolved a lot since then. Sadly, your talking points have not.

Comment Re:These show up in landfills (Score 1, Funny) 165

It doesn't even lead to freedom. Big players can easily manipulate the price and the exchanges have shown they can control who exchanges what. There's zero upsides to crypto.

Of course, all "crypto", not just proof-of-work ones. And that, my friends, is how you can tell that CO2/ewaste/chip shortage is not the reason, just a convenient pretext for the crypto hating.

To be fair, he could just be completely ignorant. Lack of knowledge seldom stops people from acting like they have justifiable opinions.

Comment Re:The entire concept of stablecoins is insane to (Score 1) 37

I'm not sure I get the idea of making loans in crypto-coins. The biggest problem when making loans is getting the person to pay you back. How does making a contract out of code help you when the person doesn't have enough money to pay you back?

The loans I'm familiar with are over-collateralized. So you deposit your $X of BTC and can then borrow say 0.4 * $X of any coin you want, including more BTC. If the value of your collateral drops relative to the value of what you've borrowed, the collateral automatically gets sold to cover the loan.

Trading on margin works the same way -- the code is constantly evaluating your PnL relative to the value of your collateral and liquidating your collateral if necessary.

Comment Re:You don't need NFTs to allow selling or transfe (Score 1) 93

People keep making the point that an NFT could allow you to use items in multiple games, but this doesn't require NFTs. If you buy a gun in CoD there is no reason the devs couldn't tell you own in when you are playing the next CoD and give you the same item in the new game; there's no need for an NFT to facilitate it.

You're right that a single game company can support items across all of its games. But if you want to support items across games by different companies -- especially if one of those companies is now out of business -- then you need to have some kind of solution for that. A third-party centralized database that everyone agrees to use is one option, a decentralized database owned by the community is another.

For me, the hard part to get around is how the incentives work out so that everyone agrees to use NFTs (with "true ownership" (tm), tradeability in multiple open marketplaces) in games as opposed to something that gives them many of the same benefits (e.g. (fake) "ownership" across multiple games by the same publisher, tradeability in a single publisher-owned marketplace) but the publishers keep most of the control. Ultimately, I think this is going to come down to how good the NFT-based games are. Having true NFTs is a benefit over NFT-like features, but not such a huge benefit that you'd be wiling to play the equivalent of Tux Racer instead of Forza.

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