Essentially, money is a network of trust. Bitcoin is a network that enables trustless consensus. It provides tremendous value IMHO (along with opportunities to scam people).
This news is about Binance being increasingly isolated. Mastercard’s deals with others (e.g. Gemini) are going strong.
A single bitcoin is currently valued over 25,000 USD and has shown to go up to over 60,000 USD. It has literally made tons of crypto million and billionaires. Ethereum has shown it's able to replace a lot of middleman banking with smart contracts but being turing complete is difficult to make secure. There are many profitable and successfully operating DAOs exclusively managed via smart contracts. Saying cryptocurrency space has failed to provide value is provably false.
I'm happy for the couple of people that got tangible financial benefits out of it and that weren't already wealthy beforehand, but this isn't exactly a benefit for society as a whole. All the rest has simply failed to materialise in any meaningful way.
What I don’t get about smart contracts is how the conditions are validated
I have a contract that Brad Pitt wins the Oscar in the next 3 years how is that validated ? Is there some widely accepted source of truth ? Couldn’t the provider be hacked or be tempted to be fraudulent.
I’m assuming the source of truth isn’t the Oscar academy cause web scraping could break easily.
Still it’s a lot of faith in human honesty and site security for automatic execution worth millions
The keyword you are looking for is Oracle. Oracle blockchains/coins are services which consolidate real world data into the block chain. Of course you then have to trust the oracle chain
Ponzi provided a lot of value to some of his early investors until the whole thing collapsed (of course all of that happened way faster).
> value is provably false.
None of what you said would suggest anything like. What you're talking about is redistribution. People buying tokens using real money from those who bought them cheaper creating:
> tons of crypto million and billionaires
in the process. Could you explain at what point this actual value is created?
I think cryptobros just have a different perception of what "providing value" is. Bitcoin's fiat value or the fact that it has made millionaires is hardly an indication of it, since the same can be said of cocaine.
Smart contracts keep having bugs. And all I hear from DAOs is that they're cornered by the agents with the most tokens - how is that an innovation over the current state of affairs in society?
Nonsensical cope. If that were true, HN would not love solar, wind, fission, fusion, room temperature superconductors, etc. HN is hype about potential/new technologies that might make sense and have real applications. Cryptocurrencies aren't that.
Something that has sporadic price fluctuations, is used as a gambling token for speculation, and cannot send value instantly to another person (crypto waiting times are over 9 hours) is not a currency.
My theory is that HN (like people in general) simply hates change.