this will get buried and everyone on this site will cry about how the industry is all a scam because centralized entities blew up, completely missing how a lot of the innovation is happening under the radar and on-chain
everyone will get mad, call for more regulation, more innovation will happen offshore/private deals for real innovation will get lapped up and everyone will get mad/wonder why the US didnt get a piece of the industry
Humans are the ones committing fraud for personal gain in traditional finance as well as in crypto. This does not negate the value proposition of crypto even one bit, in fact it strengthens it even more, because proponents have been calling for maximization of trustless open-source auditable smart contracts and minimization of human interference. ftx was a banking failure, not crypto. fraud is and always was illegal, no amount of regulation can prevent that, auditable open-source smart contracts are a good solution imo.
I'm so tired of these reddit one liners "but crypto bad" tho, hn should uphold higher standards of conversation
- Scams? Yes, there are lots of scams similar to the early days of the internet where script kiddies could scam people without having special knowledge of computer science, just by downloading some tools with controllable trojans. I remember testing it out back in the days to prank my friends, but it could have been used for actual fraud and as such it was also used. There are many startups now that focus on security for the industry and the auditors are able to catch many problems because of the transparency of open-source. Anybody can read and check the smart contract before using it or trust the auditors, although admittedly there is still a lot of room for a better user experience.
-Investing? Stocks were hit similar or even harder, Facebook for instance is down -75% YTD, Peloton is done whopping -95%(!) from ATH, many more such cases. I find it kind of strange that people unfairly point at crypto while traditional finance is guilty of the same or even worse, remember the SPAC grift? People really need to actually do their due diligence - if they don't, can they really blame anyone except themselves?
Me personally, I find crypto to be an exciting driver for innovations in cryptography research and seeing its actual implementation working in live projects, especially ZK + verifiable computation related stuff. Most of it is working remarkably well _today_ although there is a lot of room for improvement (esp UI/UX wise), I am quite optimistic for the future.
Plenty of "smart contracts" have been drained due to programming flaws because they are so extremely complicated. Very, very few people can read and understand what is happening. It might be transparent in theory but in reality it's just for show.
>Plenty of "smart contracts" have been drained due to programming flaws because they are so extremely complicated.
So? In the early days of the internet credit card scams and all sorts of scams were running rampant, the solution was not to stop developing because it's "extremely complicated" ( not true btw ), but to continuously improve systems. There are plenty of startups now that specialize on security and auditing smart contracts.
> Very, very few people can read and understand what is happening.
Anyone who can code and has a few hours can learn about it on youtube, it's not rocket science.
>It might be transparent in theory but in reality it's just for show.
Bizarre non sequitor, its transparency is an objective fact, what "show" is it supposed to be for? Auditors have been successfully discovering bugs and fixing them because of this transparency.
everyone will get mad, call for more regulation, more innovation will happen offshore/private deals for real innovation will get lapped up and everyone will get mad/wonder why the US didnt get a piece of the industry
have fun being late again, hn