• SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    It’s not that no one can be trusted. It’s that there is enough bad people and incentive to do real damage to everyone else (even the majority of good people) and unfortunately they may need to be protected from that. If we get another Great Recession that doesn’t snap back bitcoin will have its value proven, if that doesn’t happen then it’s a waste of time and effort. It’s really more of a hedge at this point until things play out

    • assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Bitcoin tracks the wider economy and as a risky ’asset’ its ‘value’ fluctuates more aggressively than safer assets. It’s basically the first thing unloaded when times look difficult. Trust me it won’t be a hedge. It never has before and will never now. Secondly, the problem with centring your entire philosophy on trustlessness is that when you introduce a little bit of trust you defeat the whole purpose of trustlessness in the first place. The moment you have a middle man that can block transactions, change transactions or interfere in transactions in other ways your trustless model collapses, and if you argue that it’s alright this actor is well vetted and trustworthy then it begs the question. Why not have all of your transactions managed by that actor and just drop the vestigial decentralised nonsense in the first place. To illustrate my point for those who don’t understand what I’m getting at. All cryptocurrencies are useless at verifying anything in the real world. Think things like supply chain verification for example. Why? Well it’s all because of something called the oracle problem. You need somebody to verify and enter the physical world’s data into the blockchain, the oracle. The problem is that there is no way to prove that the oracle is telling the truth. You have to trust the oracle; however, the oracle can lie. The oracle and feed you bad data and modify the blockchain. Your trustless model has collapsed. You might as well just find an oracle you can trust and abandon all the wasteful blockchain nonsense at this point.

      • SuckMyWang@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Bitcoin spiked when the latest banking crisis emerged and several US banks collapsed. This is not bitcoin tracking the wider economy. Bitcoin should track the wider economy only in a sense of cost of compute, electricity, against inflation and supply. Hypothetically if demand was to remain exactly the same for the next 10 years the price would increase.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Here’s the thing – do you trust the alternative power holders more? Sure, it’s less centralized, but at the end of the day there’s still power brokers.