[aphextron]

>”It's not a good store of value over the long haul”

Well sure, but no one is storing their wealth in USD. You use it to purchase assets. What store of value can you purchase with BTC without first converting to USD?

>”Binance made more money than Deutsche Bank last year. They funded growth with an ICO.”

Concentrated more wealth, you mean. What, exactly, did they contribute to the economy? At the very least, banks provide liquidity. The furthest I can gather of any crypto company mission is “make money”.

[gomox]

Soon enough, potentially, tokenized securities that represent shares of anything you can think of.

[vkou]

The cost of tracking and trading securities tokens isn't the reason for why there aren't shares for 'anything you can think of'.

Is this actually solving a real problem that someone has?

[gomox]

I am in Argentina. I can do an investment on a company being founded in France tomorrow and cash out in 3 months on a secondary market to a buyer in Angola. The friction involved in doing this in a pre-crypto world makes it a non-starter.

One of the reason VC has its characteristic geographical distribution is because exit opportunities are extremely localized. No more.

This in turn unlocks a ton of talent-capital synergy opportunities for a myriad of projects outside of the large tech hubs.

[vkou]

But you're not doing it because of any intrinsic property of crypto-coins. You're doing it because they haven't been regulated yet. (I am not implying any ill intent on your part.)

You could do the same thing with normal investments, if trading houses and banks didn't do any KYC checks.

[gomox]

I don't know about "intrinsic". No other asset class has the same characteristics. It's making investments viable that were not viable before.

No regulation exists now in conventional banking that prevents me from doing that investment without crypto. It's just not practical and therefore unviable. I would need to surf through 3 different bureaucracies in 3 different languages and currencies. If you are doing this kind of thing, it's in your best interest to always do KYC, mostly not for AML - just for general due diligence purposes.

The fundamental thing is disintermediation, not deregulation. Regulation might be able to kill the space, but it would really be a triumph of the incumbents over a real progress opportunity.

PS I'm going at it from the investor angle here but it goes without saying that enabling investment enables entrepreneurship.

[s73v3r_]

The only reason Crypto has those characteristics is because most of the crypto trading platform flat out ignore the law.

[tome]

> it's in your best interest to always do KYC

And why will this never hold for similar transactions done on the blockchain?

[mkirklions]

I'm working on trading an security, but it will not be done on blockchain.

Blockchain is expensive and slow. Centralize it and be a business that provides a good customer experience.

[Nursie]

>> Soon enough, potentially, tokenized securities that represent shares of anything you can think of.

Do you think they will actually represent shares?

As far as I can tell, all current ICOs have not represented any ownership or share of anything, other than the token itself.

[gomox]

Most ICOs don't sell security tokens. They sell utility tokens. But many ICOs have happened that sold security tokens, they just tend to be more discreet these days because of the limits on public security offerings. The security token space is also very immature still.

On the other end of the discreetness spectrum, The DAO was a security ICO and it was the largest crowdsourced project in history at the time.

[s73v3r_]

They also tended to be the, "We have all the money, now let's bail" kind of tokens.

[gomox]

Really? Can you point to a single security token issuance that was an exit scam?

[s73v3r_]

Are you honestly trying to say that there have not been ICO scams? That this has not happened?

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/13/exit-scammers-run-off-with...

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/18/another-day-another-50-mil...

https://cointelegraph.com/news/unpacking-the-5-biggest-crypt...

Do you need more?

[mkirklions]

>Well sure, but no one is storing their wealth in USD.

My grandma did. 10,000 dollars when I was born into a bank account for college.

I think it was worth ~11k 27 years later since I ended up paying for college with work.

Ended up spending it on my house. If that 10k was invested... whew...

[hapnin]

No one stores their wealth in USD because it's not a good store of value.

> What store of value can you purchase with BTC without first converting to USD?

Switching out to gold from BTC is pretty painless.

[anonymouz]

Bitcoin has crazy volatility compared to gold and even USD. Sure, you can use it for speculation, but no one in their right mind uses Bitcoin as a store of value.

People just hope that someone else will use it as a sure if value, so that the price rises and they get rich off it. Ie, speculation.

[Fnoord]

To the person saying they've stored Bitcoin value for 8 years: on a grand scale, you are an exception.

Many people who started using Bitcoin last year lost a lot of their value.