Is it too soon to talk about Crypto yet?

[MinnesotaEric]

Well they sure ain't putting that on any of the extant blockchains lol.


Not on blockchain.. Because it doesn't scale. Also putting voting records on there is a terrible idea, PUBLIC ledger.. no thanks (and yes even the "less than public ones" have a lot of .. interesting.. features in that regard).


Why have no banks actually launched a crypto then? "deeply interested" in soaking some suckers I'm sure.. in crypto itself.. IDK.. gonna need a little more support for that one (and not from the "we're already heavily invested in money laundering" crowd... an extension of one criminal enterprise into another does not a "banks are deeply interested" make).


Which are not blockchain based. But the why is mostly because they want a cut of the CC fees (this isn't.. complicated.. although the digital wallet tech kinda is.. and also isn't super.. what I'd call.. safe yet..).


"decentralized storage" LOL LMAO ROFL even. Are you trying to bring back NFT's? Yes dozens of QPS globally.. super enabling...

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This is what happens when you outsource your thinking I guess.

But back to the whole "reserve" thing.. so far it's just "crypto the government has seized" which a) isn't very exciting (as witnessed by the failure to moon..) and b) says a lot about the whole "secure from governments" theory. Personally I'm a bit sad they're not just dumping it mostly because watching the market meltdown would have been fun as there's so very much not enough liquidity to absorb it.

There were however a few "mysteriously well timed" transactions around the whole "strategic reserve" announcements... Tell me again how it's not all just insiders soaking retail hard. Seriously who does a 50x long position.. hah.


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Are we done with Paul Krugman? I ask because the focus of my response was on the question that there isn't a viable use for crypto.

Your response highlights the missteps that have been taken in the development of crypto or the motivation to avoid merchant fees through Visa and Master Card but not really on the changes that seem to be on the immediate horizon.

Do you think that commerce will not continue to evolve on the internet as the world continues to shift from physical to digital services?

If not, then my luddite friend, throw your sabbo into the works because change is coming!

 

[quicksandfarmer]

We need to distinguish between blockchain and cryptocurrency. Blockchain is a useful technology when you need to keep records and none of the participants trust each other. There are applications for that, although so far they are few and somewhat contrived. For most applications it's just better to have a trusted intermediary do the record-keeping.

Cryptocurrency is an application of blockchain. What are the real-world applications of cryptocurrency?

 

[Fuddyduddy1952]

To me everything in life boils down to the tangible and intangible. Love is intangible but has value. Value but not monetary value.
Everything tangible has monetary value. We have a composter that turns vegetable scraps into fertile soil, same with our horse manure.
The fallacy to me is assigning a monetary value to cryptocurrency. Never before in history can I think of anything intangible assigned a monetary value that wasn't nefarious such as "Give me $XXX and I will give you XXX" (object, labor, etc.). You hand someone money assuming you'll receive something in return which you may never get.
It's ludicrous to me comparing crypto to currency. Currency at least you have a tangible paper note or coin.

 

[rumwrks]

Your response highlights the missteps that have been taken in the development of crypto or the motivation to avoid merchant fees through Visa and Master Card but not really on the changes that seem to be on the immediate horizon.

These "changes" have been "real soon now" since crypto started, wake me up when something is actually useful outside of the limited transaction rate crime and scam uses.

Comparing it to the internet is a false analogy. There were early and obvious USEFUL uses of the internet (I mean email for starters.. but I also was a member of a team of 2 that put the first hotel inventory on the internet in '93, which wasn't all that far in.. even before that we heavily used gopher, usenet, and ftp services as well).

Do you think that commerce will not continue to evolve on the internet as the world continues to shift from physical to digital services?

Obviously yes, again you're (I presume at this point intentionally) confounding "digital services" with "cryptocurrency" when the only real association is a contrived one (also not to be confused with cryptography which is also evolving).

I ask because the focus of my response was on the question that there isn't a viable use for crypto.

Which I'm notseeing a lot evidence of in your response either other than a bunch more "soon", "early" and "line go up" nonsense.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

To me everything in life boils down to the tangible and intangible. Love is intangible but has value. Value but not monetary value.
Everything tangible has monetary value. We have a composter that turns vegetable scraps into fertile soil, same with our horse manure.
The fallacy to me is assigning a monetary value to cryptocurrency. Never before in history can I think of anything intangible assigned a monetary value that wasn't nefarious such as "Give me $XXX and I will give you XXX" (object, labor, etc.). You hand someone money assuming you'll receive something in return which you may never get.
It's ludicrous to me comparing crypto to currency. Currency at least you have a tangible paper note or coin.

I'm into HiFi stuff. In my house, I've got vintage MacIntosh kit driving Alon IV reference loudspeakers which are the same type that were used to mix the original Star Wars movies. They sound terrific, with a wide, tight soundstage while the MacIntosh amp and preamp deliver a nice warm, analog sound. Outside I have 2000W of goodness with an extended Bluetooth range that allows me to play toe-tappers from my phone pretty much wherever I am around my home from outside.

Years ago when mp3 music was coming on stage and Steve Jobs stopped shipping Macs with CD-ROM drives I was irked because I wanted the physical music. I wanted to own the records and CDs for my music collection. Then Steve Jobs started selling music through iTunes online and started making iPods. I bought an iPod and slowly all of my music was converted to digital versions and I saw the light: everything was moving toward its digital equivalent because the digital equivalent was easier to acquire, easier to find and manage, easier to reference, easier to store, and broadly accessible to more devices making the digital version better than the physical version.

These days when we make changes to our investments, we go online and do so. Our paper statements are downloaded as PDFs. Often when we pay our bills we do so online. And how many of us are still making cash purchases when our credit cards offer us better security than cash and rewards, something cash cannot offer? Everything is moving toward a digital equivalent.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

Here is a live feed for the 2025 Crypto Summit.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1898113819127259431

The 12 Apostles picture format is not lost on much of the audience. LOL

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Here is a live feed for the 2025 Crypto Summit.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1898113819127259431

The 12 Apostles picture format is not lost on much of the audience. LOL

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So I'm confused.

I thought the whole point of having a “cryptocurrency” was to have a currency that was not dependent on a government or authority; a currency that was immune to any government regulation, tracking, or taxation.

And now for some reason, cryptocurrency enthusiasts want governments involved in their government-less currency.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

So I'm confused.

I thought the whole point of having a “cryptocurrency” was to have a currency that was not dependent on a government or authority; a currency that was immune to any government regulation, tracking, or taxation.

And now for some reason, cryptocurrency enthusiasts want governments involved in their government-less currency.

There are many discussions on X about your very point. Today in an interview with Bloomberg, David Sacks, our AI and Crypto Czar, said we need to have a Reserve because we already own Crypto and we need a better way to manage it.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1898066897326748084

 

[Fuddyduddy1952]

I'm into HiFi stuff. In my house, I've got vintage MacIntosh kit driving Alon IV reference loudspeakers which are the same type that were used to mix the original Star Wars movies. They sound terrific, with a wide, tight soundstage while the MacIntosh amp and preamp deliver a nice warm, analog sound. Outside I have 2000W of goodness with an extended Bluetooth range that allows me to play toe-tappers from my phone pretty much wherever I am around my home from outside.

Years ago when mp3 music was coming on stage and Steve Jobs stopped shipping Macs with CD-ROM drives I was irked because I wanted the physical music. I wanted to own the records and CDs for my music collection. Then Steve Jobs started selling music through iTunes online and started making iPods. I bought an iPod and slowly all of my music was converted to digital versions and I saw the light: everything was moving toward its digital equivalent because the digital equivalent was easier to acquire, easier to find and manage, easier to reference, easier to store, and broadly accessible to more devices making the digital version better than the physical version.

These days when we make changes to our investments, we go online and do so. Our paper statements are downloaded as PDFs. Often when we pay our bills we do so online. And how many of us are still making cash purchases when our credit cards offer us better security than cash and rewards, something cash cannot offer? Everything is moving toward a digital equivalent.

True...but those digital examples all originate from tangible things, not ether. Music made by musicians with instruments.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

We need to distinguish between blockchain and cryptocurrency. Blockchain is a useful technology when you need to keep records and none of the participants trust each other. There are applications for that, although so far they are few and somewhat contrived. For most applications it's just better to have a trusted intermediary do the record-keeping.

Cryptocurrency is an application of blockchain. What are the real-world applications of cryptocurrency?

Here is a specific use.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spacex-uses-stablecoins-collect-payments-170027463.html

 

[Fuddyduddy1952]

There are many discussions on X about your very point. Today in an interview with Bloomberg, David Sacks, our AI and Crypto Czar, said we need to have a Reserve because we already own Crypto and we need a better way to manage it.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1898066897326748084

Maybe I heard that differently because I don't own cryptocurrency. What David Sacks is saying is the Federal government already owns 400,000 bitcoin (or $36.4B today) from civil and criminal seizures which has value.
That's an extremely important point because what is the government supposed to do with it? To me the choice is let it be part of the Federal reserve or what I would do is wait until price rises again (?), then use it to buy gold bullion then stored in Fort Knox.
It's a matter of risk. Gold is tangible and will always have value (about $400B at Fort Knox today).

 

[MinnesotaEric]

True...but those digital examples all originate from tangible things, not ether. Music made by musicians with instruments.

I hear what you are saying. In my mind our discussion about intangibles circles right back around to what we call money. Hear me out.

Historically money has been represented by something relatively scarce. In a simple sense, the scarcity of the thing represented a store of "power" or "effort." Spending the money deployed that storehouse of power or effort to purchase or exchange for goods or services that took either power or effort or both power and effort to create.

But long before either of us were born, what we call "money" became debt-based. Money as debt became an "I owe you" for the equivalent of the money's face value. It used to be the paper money used in exchange for goods and services represented a tangible item that actually held the face value of what the paper money represented. But we moved away from having a connection of paper money representing anything of value when we moved away from a metals standard.

For this reason, we never updated the value of the gold stored at Fort Knox because the value of the gold didn't matter to the value we assigned to our paper money. The value of the gold no longer mattered because our paper money was no longer backed by tangible items, but by the faith we entrust in it that people will accept our money as payment for goods and services because our nation has declared the paper money as fiat currency of the nation.

So what we call money became a faith-based medium of exchange for goods and services based on the level of trust entrusted in our nation.

But because of a variety of reasons, the money supply of our nation has continued to endlessly expand and this expansion has slowly decreased the notational buying power. We call it inflation and generally speaking, we've been taught that inflation is a good thing because, over time, inflation diminishes the value of existing debt.

We experience the diminishing value of everything valued in fiat through the ever-increasing cost of everything because of the ever-expanding supply of our money.

But what if the money supply was fixed to a given amount, what would happen then?

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Here is a specific use.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spacex-uses-stablecoins-collect-payments-170027463.html

There's nothing "crypto" about that use, in that it doesn't rely on any crypto capability like anonymity, irreversibility or the ability to function in an absence of trust. Each party to the transaction is dependent upon a trusted intermediary at their end of the transaction, it could just as well be a bank wire transfer, Western Union or an Apple gift card.

I suspect the reason they want to use crypto instead of one of those other methods is that these are countries which have currency controls which make conventional transfers difficult. If so, this is probably illegal. In which case we're still looking for use cases which don't involve illegal activity.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

We experience the diminishing value of everything valued in fiat through the ever-increasing cost of everything because of the ever-expanding supply of our money.

But what if the money supply was fixed to a given amount, what would happen then?

We had that until 1932, when the country was on the gold standard, which for practical purposes meant that the money supply was fixed, at least in the short term.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th century the economy was characterized by a boom and bust cycle. The economy would start to grow but since the money supply was unable to grow with the economy the lack of money would drive interest rates up, causing the economy to crash and banks to fail. They called it a financial "panic," -- although today we would call it a recession or depression -- and it was generally accepted that it would happen about every ten years.

It's no coincidence that 1932 was the year that the US decided it had had enough of the gold standard and needed a money supply that could expand with the economy.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

Maybe I heard that differently because I don't own cryptocurrency. What David Sacks is saying is the Federal government already owns 400,000 bitcoin (or $36.4B today) from civil and criminal seizures which has value.
That's an extremely important point because what is the government supposed to do with it? To me the choice is let it be part of the Federal reserve or what I would do is wait until price rises again (?), then use it to buy gold bullion then stored in Fort Knox.
It's a matter of risk. Gold is tangible and will always have value (about $400B at Fort Knox today).

Good point. I would ask why the government needs to "manage" its supply of cryptocurrency anyway, why doesn't it just sell it like any other seized asset? Isn't the whole appeal that it exists independent of any government management?

And if it's supposedly immune to any government regulation, tracking, or taxation, how did it happen that the government was able to seize $36 billion dollars of it?

 

[Fuddyduddy1952]

I hear what you are saying. In my mind our discussion about intangibles circles right back around to what we call money. Hear me out.

Historically money has been represented by something relatively scarce. In a simple sense, the scarcity of the thing represented a store of "power" or "effort." Spending the money deployed that storehouse of power or effort to purchase or exchange for goods or services that took either power or effort or both power and effort to create.

But long before either of us were born, what we call "money" became debt-based. Money as debt became an "I owe you" for the equivalent of the money's face value. It used to be the paper money used in exchange for goods and services represented a tangible item that actually held the face value of what the paper money represented. But we moved away from having a connection of paper money representing anything of value when we moved away from a metals standard.

For this reason, we never updated the value of the gold stored at Fort Knox because the value of the gold didn't matter to the value we assigned to our paper money. The value of the gold no longer mattered because our paper money was no longer backed by tangible items, but by the faith we entrust in it that people will accept our money as payment for goods and services because our nation has declared the paper money as fiat currency of the nation.

So what we call money became a faith-based medium of exchange for goods and services based on the level of trust entrusted in our nation.

But because of a variety of reasons, the money supply of our nation has continued to endlessly expand and this expansion has slowly decreased the notational buying power. We call it inflation and generally speaking, we've been taught that inflation is a good thing because, over time, inflation diminishes the value of existing debt.

We experience the diminishing value of everything valued in fiat through the ever-increasing cost of everything because of the ever-expanding supply of our money.

But what if the money supply was fixed to a given amount, what would happen then?

Harry Truman was president when I was born and I still have silver certificate bills from the 50s. Show me where cryptocurrency is legal tender as is stamped on our currency. It's not.
One could argue ALL goods and services is faith based. US currency ($2.3T from what I looked up) is tangible and marked legal tender for debts public and private.
I haven't been to any store that says an item is "$20 or 0.00023476 Bitcoin."
Some economists say it's worth less than $zero because of all the computing electricity it requires...paid for by tangible money.
Everything is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it, but never in history have I heard of something intangible having value except labor.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

We had that until 1932, when the country was on the gold standard, which for practical purposes meant that the money supply was fixed, at least in the short term.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th century the economy was characterized by a boom and bust cycle. The economy would start to grow but since the money supply was unable to grow with the economy the lack of money would drive interest rates up, causing the economy to crash and banks to fail. They called it a financial "panic," -- although today we would call it a recession or depression -- and it was generally accepted that it would happen about every ten years.

It's no coincidence that 1932 was the year that the US decided it had had enough of the gold standard and needed a money supply that could expand with the economy.

Yup, you're right. There is something of a correlation between a fixed supply of say Bitcoin and anything else that is rare, but not unique. We see the boom and bust cycle to this day where cheap money lending (low interest) expands the velocity of commerce, where the expansion is thought to be real growth, but is really the result of the expansion of money supply, and then inflation sets in leading to a slowing of the velocity of commerce through increased interest rates.

Keynesian economics holds that we can control or dampen the boom and bust cycles through the careful regulation of interest rates while Austrian economics holds that we should allow the bust cycle to happen because without the cathartic bust, bad actors never get weeded out and debt in the system grows and grows until it is no longer possible to manage or sustainable and the money system collapses causing far more damage than a seasonal bust cycle. History has tended to side with Keynesian theory as central bankers around the world continue to steer markets.

This is to say that sovereign debt has continued to accumulate throughout the world. If the value or the purchasing power of any given fiat currency was the sole determiner of the value of assets, we see asset values accretively grow in value. Demand (for various reasons) also affects asset valuations, but generally, people invest in various asset classes and those asset classes that offer the best returns generally find favor with the investor class.

Putting this economic discussion into the context of asset classes, we can then ask what asset classes look as though they will perform better than inflation over time, or taking it a step further, what are the best asset classes to invest in?

 

[MinnesotaEric]

Harry Truman was president when I was born and I still have silver certificate bills from the 50s. Show me where cryptocurrency is legal tender as is stamped on our currency. It's not.
One could argue ALL goods and services is faith based. US currency ($2.3T from what I looked up) is tangible and marked legal tender for debts public and private.
I haven't been to any store that says an item is "$20 or 0.00023476 Bitcoin."
Some economists say it's worth less than $zero because of all the computing electricity it requires...paid for by tangible money.
Everything is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it, but never in history have I heard of something intangible having value except labor.

It takes energy to "mine" Bitcoin and to maintain the network. As such, in a basic form, Bitcoin is viewed as a store of energy.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

It takes energy to "mine" Bitcoin and to maintain the network. As such, in a basic form, Bitcoin is viewed as a store of energy.

Except there's no way to get that energy back. One-way storage is better known as disposal.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

Meanwhile, yesterday's 2025 Crypto Summit was pretty much a nothing-burger, back-slapping event that did not present any new policy. However, according to Keven O'Leary, the Thursday night parties were much more interesting with Kevin tweeting,

"Everyone’s talking about Trump’s Bitcoin reserve, but the real story is the shift in regulation. Crypto is finally moving out of the lawsuit era and into real policy. Plus, the push to digitize the U.S. dollar is gaining steam, this is how we keep America on top. Warren’s not happy, but even her own party sees the writing on the wall. I was in D.C., I got the signal, this is happening."

https://twitter.com/x/status/1898384069978620196

What is interesting is our President promised no CBDC central bank digital currency while on the campaign trail and this was said because most crypto people are against central bank digital currencies because they give too much power to their governments as to where and how money can be spent as well as making it easy to track spending.