Hard money is not desirable. Whatever comes out of this "the country's money supply should be determined by some cryptobros" is not going to be the result.
I get the "anti-crypto-bro" sentiments, but Ive trusted the FOSS/linux communities for long enough to have open and auditable tech and clear decision making, it might not be perfect but it is a lot more transparent than my government.
I'd pick the crypto-communities and thousands of people gaming them to design better mechanisms for the everyday people to use, than a few politicians and the banks that are bribing them.
I think HN repeatedly underestimates the overlap of these communities. FOSS ideology is critical in pretty much all crypto/defi projects.I can probably pick any dev in the space and they'll most likely be running linux.
HN refuses to change its collective position it settled on a decade ago. It seems people here got stuck on some abstract projections of "crypto-capitalism-cruelty" and refuse to admit there might be something interesting going on.
Where did the "move fast and break things" people, the "disrupt the institutions" people, and the hackers go? crypto.
Or should we only be working on sass startups to reformat pdfs. is that what we're allowed to work on? everything else is a moral sin?
The problem with that is that there doesn’t seem to be anything interesting going on, beyond speculative hyper-capitalism. All the problems crypto was going to solve were illusory, or crypto was not a useful tool in solving them. Instead we’ve had years and years of hype and bubbles and solution-looking-for-a-problem but nothing much of any practical value.
“Move fast and break things” now has a bad rap too in much of society - it turns out not everyone wants their things broken, and some of that stuff was useful. The world is not as in-love with the output of Silicon Valley startups as it used to be, having seen some of them play out.
Monero is very close to the original cryptocurrency dream. Private, anonymous, fast transactions, low fees, mineable by CPUs, can be and actually is used as a currency.
> Agreed. The money supply should be flexible to help alleviate the effects of inevitable financial crashes.
In reality, you either do it in secret...or it makes the crash even worse because people would be even more risk averse because they see the government using these non conventional tool...hence "it must be pretty bad, better save some more"
QE is the quintessential example of this. The only American who benefitted from QE was Bernanke, so he got to be hailed as a hero and now everybody genuflects to him and uses his "playbook".
> QE is the quintessential example of this. The only American who benefitted from QE was Bernanke, so he got to be hailed as a hero and now everybody genuflects to him and uses his "playbook".
The US came out of the 2008 Great Recession much better than the Eurozone due to its ability to borrow cheaply as a result of QE. The Eurozone was hamstrung by the ECB's inability to act similarly and the 2012 agreement to allow the ECB to purchase "unlimited" amounts of bonds saved the currency.
US went down more steeply and emerged faster than the EU, not because of QE, or all the fairy tales told by the Fed.
The US as a country is more dynamic, younger and more risk prone than the Eurozone . That's about it. QE had nothing to do with anything.
In turn the dynamism and risk proneness of the US is nothing compared to places like India, Pakistan or Nigeria.
The EU is still a bit more risk prone than Japan but it's really close
Japan is the most risk averse country on Earth and are stagnating since the 90s , no matter how much QE they do or how much they tinker with their unit of account. Economic growth requires entrepreneurial risk taking and consumer risk taking. Down there they don't even risk going to the bar and approach girls, they hardly have sex anymore. With this social landscape the entrepreneurial risk taking which is necessary to start a business and consumer risk taking necessary to max out a credit card for purchases...that's a pure mirage and tinkering with the unit of account or the plumbing won't save them, or anybody for that matter. Just serves as a way for Treasury secretary and the BoJ chair to keep his job and justify his social status because he is "doing something to fix the economy"
Back to the GFC, the US went down more steeply and emerged faster the same way a dude in his 20s can do too much drugs, be wasted and out for a couple of hours and then go to work as nothing happened in the morning.
The destiny of megasocial groups made up of 400M people are not decided by the few elected officials, it's the elected officials who find themselves in those spots because they enact the policies which are popular among the 400M people.
The Eurozone crisis that followed the Great Recession resulted from the structure of the Euro, which had removed the option for countries in the Eurozone to monetize their debt, creating a default risk, forcing them to inflict disastrous austerity on their economies and lengthening the recession.
While US states saw similar affects on their budgets (since they are not allowed to run deficits) this was offset by large federal deficits which kept the economy running. Borrowing costs were kept low by the Fed's QE.
EU central spending is only about 1% of GDP, much less smaller than the US Federal Government spending of 20% in normal years and does not borrow in its own right. The ECB's eventual agreement to stand behind Eurozone governments and pledging to buy their debt was crucial to resolving the crisis.
Inflation is almost never caused by government spending. It’s caused by regulatory policy that allows, for example, bubbles in real estate or by external shocks like oil and so on. The whole “fiscal policy will debase the currency” thing is blown way out of proportion. I should also point out that there are much better financial instruments than cash to hold long term savings and they’re being made ever more accessible.
The benefit of a government supplied digital currency is a payment system that isn’t run for profit.
Better than a system in which there are no tools to deal with such problems, and in which monetary supply causes a constraint on the economy, rewarding those who simply hold the currency rather than the productive or investors.
Thus far the only successful examples of Blockchain technology have been based on digital currencies and Bitcoin has done nothing but continue it's success.
On the other hand, there is not one example of "Blockchain technology" put to work on anything that needed it.
I now barely use my bank account, i get paid in dai, i pay others in dai. occasionally i have to move dai into fiat for bills. hopefully these central bank digital currencies help bridge that last step.
I can take a loan against my collateral with https://alchemix.fi/ to buy things irl. I have a https://monolith.xyz/ visa card to pay for things with my crypto (until bridges arrive).
I should clarify, Ethereum isn't merely "Blockchain technology", it's a more programmable Bitcoin (with other trade offs of course). In that sense, it's useful for the reasons you mentioned. The point applies more to projects that think they can replicate some form of this success by just hashing a block and stringing them together.
Those are mostly just front ends (expect monolith which is just for visa, not a long term thing), I can make/host my own front ends for the protocols if i want.
e.g. the yearn dai vault address is 0x19D3364A399d251E894aC732651be8B0E4e85001 i can call the functions at that address via my own node with my own code if i want to.
It isn't in a jurisdiction, no-one else is responsible for my money but me. That comes with risk sure, but it also comes with liberty. They are decentralized applications and I can always opt out and move somewhere else. I can take their code for their financial application, fork it and re-deploy my own version under my central control if i wanted too. Imagine forking a HSBC savings account. It is wild and crazy. Some people don't like that. I love it.
You can feel free to do as you like. A lot of the interest in crypto is that if these tools allow people to coordinate and communicate more effectively than the old tools, then they will come to replace them. If it works as we imagine then you may end up using it and not even knowing.
Maybe it doesnt scale? lets try it. Maybe 99% of people dont want to use it? Cool, lets try it.
We don't have to be 100% better, we have to be 0.1% better. I think that is absolutely in reach. I think that will be transformational for many. It will not bring us utopia, it might have bad side effects, hopefully the good outweighs the bad.
And is this not spurred from market desires too? How do we know the difference between genuine forces of innovation and a temporary trend?
I remember using the internet for the first time in the late 90s, it was slow and clunky and magical. We had twenty years of silicon valley startup culture, there was some fun there, but it is so tired. Crypto-communities are the most fun i've had on the internet in a long long time. And the DeFi/DAO/Ethereum stacks feel magical.
Maybe i'm wrong and it is nothing in the long term, but maybe we dont have to assume the authority of the legacy system is legitimate. Maybe the feeling of liberation it brings with it, and the love in the community, will drive the space to continue to out-perform the markets, out-innovate the fintech startups, and out-last the legacy systems.
But I think you are projecting yourself onto the regular citizen.
The thing which up to now the crypto world has managed to capture about the regular citizen is its fear of inflation and strong preference for deflation which allows him to increase his net worth without doing any work, just by sheer deflationary force baked in the protocol.
From a purely financial return standpoint: If DeFi/DAO/Eth is what the internet was back in the days, then it's IRC.
IRC didn't make any money. Facebook which is the dictionary definition of tired and not fun...well it will smash the record as the fastest Company from 0 to 1T.
So the equivalent to that would be betting on the Bank which decides to make Buterin the CEO or the maybe a new properly regulated fintech startup which wears the mantle of DeFi and the PR of Eth, but it's really an old school intermediary.
I get what you are saying about fun, but fun and finances shouldn't be mixed, in my opinion. Because you'll never know what other people who are not yourself would consider fun and if they'd jump on board to legitimize the community and have the token/stock you invested in appreciate
"Blockchain" is close to useless unless it is coupled with being public, permissionless, borderless among other things. The companies that jumped on this "Blockchain" "DLT" nonsense bandwagon to this day do not understand any of the fundamentals. Just using a distributed ledger does not provide any benefits that they try to borrow from likes of Bitcoin. Distributed ledgers have existed for decades.
Anyone that holds bitcoin is using it everyday as a store of value. It's unnecessary to go into all the reasons Bitcoin makes sense in this thread, plenty of resource out there. Suffice to say that by any measure, market determined or otherwise, Bitcoin's usage has constantly (or even exponentially) increased since inception. Either this hoard of people are getting more and more wrong every year, or perhaps you're looking at it from the wrong angle.
> This just shows that blockchain is a good technology.
At no point does the original article mention blockchain, which actually improves its credibility given a Central Bank Digital Currency would not benefit from a public blockchain (as distinct from a permissioned distributed ledger).
Explore digital currencies is highly likely to be blockchain
> Meanwhile, the Bank of England also announced a new omnibus bank account, a special account at the central bank targeted at regulated payment systems. The new account is well-suited to Fnality, the blockchain-based payment system owned by 15 institutions.
Hard money is not desirable. Whatever comes out of this "the country's money supply should be determined by some cryptobros" is not going to be the result.